Wednesday, December 2, 2015

I'm creating a new WDS + MDT infrastructure almost from scratch and I'm using VMware for deployment and image creation.
Because I'm using VMware VMXNET3 for network and VMware ParaVirtual SCSI for storage I needed to inject this 2 drivers on my Windows Deployment Servers (WDS) boot image for installing the created images.

Doing this on MDT when creating the boot images for the litetouch deployment has no issue, but for the boot.wim for installing images (extracted for the sources\boot.wim of Windows DVD) something goes wrong.
For some unknown although the VMware ParaVirtual driver gets easily inject, the VMXNET3 driver don't.
Not really investigated the reason, but has a workaround, follow this easy steps.

So what we're going to do it's to inject the drivers on boot.wim file using DISM:

First copy the file from a DVD/ISO (it's located on "...\sources\boot.wim") and copy it to a local drive (ex.: D:\Temp\)

Now, you're ready to inject the VMware VMXNET3 Driver (or any other drivers), you just need to point to the *.inf file:DISM /Image:D:\Temp\MountPoint /Add-Driver /Driver:D:\Temp\Drivers\VMwareVMXNET3\vmxnet3ndis6.inf

Microsoft has recently launched a new version of Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2013 Update 1 version 8298.

There's been a couple of issues with this build because the way the DeploymentShare$ it's created.

If you take a look at this share permission, you'll notice that permissions are just for "CREATOR OWNER" instead of "Everyone" like the previous versions.

Besides that, now the DeployRoot parameter it's not configured on the bootstrap.ini.

So, to make this work again, follow this steps:

First, you'll need to edit your DeploymentShare$ permissions so that you can connect to MDT from the machine you're deployment.You can achieve this simply by adding the group "Everyone" to the share permissions, or if you want to be more restrictive you can add the "Administrators" group with "Full Control".

Now that you're done with the permissions, you'll need to take care of bootstrap.ini.To do so, just navigate to your DeploymentShare folder, and open "bootstrap.ini" that's located on the "Control" folder

Here you'll have to had under "[Default]" the following parameter:DeployRoot=\\your_mdt_server\DeploymentShare$